March 17, 2000
Volume 2/ Number 7
Dear Friend and Colleague:
Early this week Congressmen Todd Tiahrt (R-4-KS) and Christopher Smith (R-4-NJ) called upon USAID to investigate its “family planning” projects in Peru which appear to be in violation of US law. This request was based on testimony obtained by PRI in Peru from women who say they were pressured or bribed into undergoing sterilization or contracepting with IUDs, Depo-Provera, and birth control pills. A special hearing on USAID activities has been called by the House Appropriations Foreign Operations subcommittee on USAID for Wednesday 22 March 2000 by the Chairman of that subcommittee, Sonny Callahan (R-1-AL; [email protected] 202/225-2041).
Steven W. Mosher
President
USAID Controversy Erupts in Dominican Republic
The Archbishop of Santo Domingo Decries USAID ‘Death Squads’
DOMINICAN REPUBLIC — The Archbishop of Santo Domingo, Nicolas Cardinal Lopez Rodriguez, has decried “USAID death squads” in the wake of comments by the wife of the US ambassador praising the large numbers of sterilizations carried out by US-funded clinics on poor women in the Dominican Republic (DR).
According to a leading newspaper in Santo Domingo (Listin Diairo, “Rechaza criticas del Cardenal,” by Joselin Rodriguez, 2 February 2000), Kathleen Manatt, wife of US Ambassador Charles Manatt, who is the former head of the Democratic National Committee, said she was pleased that 600 sterilizations had taken place at the Rosa Cisneros clinic. The Rosa Cisneros abortion clinic is described as a “reproductive health” center by the NGO that runs it, the Dominican Association for the Well-Being of the Family (PROFAMILIA; www.profamilia.org.do).
Population Research Institute (PRI) on 17 February 2000 placed calls to the head office of the US Agency for International Development (USAID) in Santo Domingo. An official there confirmed that USAID funds PROFAMILIA. In turn, PROFAMILIA confirmed that its main source of funding to operate the Rosa Cisneros clinic comes from USAID.
Word of the Cardinal’s denunciation reached Congressman Todd Tiahrt in the US, who promptly sent a letter to US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. “Cardinal Lopez Rodriguez is the Archbishop of Santo Domingo and a former president of the Latin American Bishops Conference,” Tiahrt wrote. “Clearly a person in his position would not use such intemperate language without provocation. According to those same reports, the cardinal was reacting to certain statements attributed to Kathleen Manatt, the wife of our Ambassador to the Dominican Republic” (Letter from Todd Tiahrt to Madeleine K. Albright, 10 February 2000).
The US embassy has since denied that Manatt praised the Santa Rosa clinic’s sterilization program. In fact, PRI has learned that repeated attempts were made by officials at the US embassy to kill a story on the subject that appeared in Our Sunday Visitor (“Dominican Cardinal Blasts AID ‘Death Squads,'” by Joseph Esposito, OSV, 5 March 2000, 5).
In that story, Cardinal Lopez is quoted as saying “I feel profoundly offended, primarily by the insult of [Kathleen Manatt] coming to this country to do what she doesn’t have to do…. [S]he can do what she wants [in the US], and her government, which doesn’t know much about morality, either, can do whatever it thinks…. We want to be poor but honest, we want to accept the truth; we don’t want anyone to come to take advantage of our condition and defenselessness.”
As the Cardinal’s comments suggest, there is great resentment in the developing world against the US for insisting upon population control as a condition of receiving US foreign aid. Imagine the reaction in the US if the Dominican Republic funded clinics within our borders which carried out large numbers of sterilizations. Might some consider the agents of this DR-funded campaign to be “death squads”? It is entirely possible.
There is no reason to doubt USAID’s claim that its “support will continue to accelerate fertility decline in the Dominican Republic” (USAID, “The USAID FY 1998 Congressional Presentation,” Dominican Republic, http://www.info.usaid.gov/pubs/cp98/lac/countries/do.htm. The problem is that the DR’s fertility rate, at 2.65, is already fast approaching replacement rate fertility (UN Population Division, “World Population Prospects,” The 1998 Revision, 163). If the birth rate is not to dip below replacement, creating enormous societal strains and hindering future economic development, then these programs need to be phased out-and quickly.
